Made by Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati, both members of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, the film is constructed from recordings made in 1961 in West Papua by Michael Rockefeller, heir to the legendary Standard Oil family who had been involved in early oil exploration in New Guinea, targeting the Hubula people under Dutch colonial rule. The film brings sounds, unheard for decades, out into the open and now into the Papuan archives as well. While West Papua remains occupied by Indonesia, Rockefeller’s formerly hidden audio archive also represents a vital preservation of much of the Hubula language and traditional songs which have been lost to current generations through years of colonial rule, exploitation and globalization.

Expedition Content is screened with Temporary Stored in the block titled Listening to the Archive, which explores the colonial sound archive as both a record of extraction and a site of reconstituted listening. Bringing together two distinct approaches, the programme considers how acts of listening can challenge inherited narratives, reveal archival absences, and open new ways of encountering colonial histories.

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